contacts manager

Digital age allows us to have many friends, much more than we can deal with really. You can meet them on forumsn, through online connections, facebook, etc... and it is becoming increasingly hard to keep up with all these connections.

CRM tools (Customer Relationship Managament) have been around for a while. We now start seing what we could call FRM tools (Friend Relationship Management).

LinkedIn, Facebook can be used to keep an eye on what your "friends" are doing. But these online applications are also networking platforms, so not real "RFM" tools in my opinion.

Gist and Xobni are the real thing. These tools allows you to collect automatically information about your contacts, the way they are interconnected, the conversations you have with them thr0ugh many social channels, information about them on the internet, etc...

These are vey valuable tool, which I now use on a daily basis. They save you time, let you focus on other aspects of your business, and automate relationship management.

W3C validation

It is interesting to hear about W3C from Matt Cutts, a chap working at Google and answering questions about search engines optimisation.

Most of the websites, including Google, don't respect W3C standards. And there is no "direct" relation between W3C compliance and search optimisation or browsers compatibility.

I am sure that Google can aford the best front-end designers in the world... and I always find it amusing to see in front-end designers or in quotes**: produce 100% W3C compliant XHTML code.

This is a great objective to strive for 100% W3C compliant code, but can hardly be a requirement for complex dynamic sites.

** I must admit that I put this in proposals myself, when I know that:
1) it is achievable (semi-static sites)
2) it will re-assure the client who has been told that validation is mandatory for quality websites..

I just hope that the distribution of this video will help destroying this myth.